


ratnakara, on becoming valmiki

by Thorne



Category: Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Genre: F/M, M/M, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 18:23:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorne/pseuds/Thorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How to disappear (almost) completely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ratnakara, on becoming valmiki

It's late afternoon, and the sunlight slants down golden through the leaves, spills itself over his hands and gives him nothing to hold onto. Snowman sits with his hands cupped and balanced on his legs, his legs crossed over each other-- awkward position, nothing so easy as the swamis made it look in the pictures dug out of the Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM. But that was the point, maybe, to control discomfort and make it pay out dividends.

_Stupid_ , Crake would have said. _Action over inaction, Jimmy. Let me take you through a hypothetical situation--_

But enlightenment and Crake and where the two relate (or don't) aside, he keeps getting distracted by his feet. He wants to pick at the horny yellow skin of his soles, his grimy heels. The rough edges of the calluses catch and scratch against his sheet; he wants the stupid simple pleasure of being able to clip his toenails and watching the small, cleanly-cut arcs fall away. He is losing so much of himself already; it would be nice to at least do it in manageable pieces.

_Avatar. Incantation. Invocation. Mantra._

_Dirge_ , Snowman thinks, and irritably uncrosses his cramping legs.

The Crakers are singing; he can hear them only faintly, carried on the sluggish breeze. It should be out of place but it's not. It's just pure sound, no special inflection, no real variation, no more human than wind in the trees. He can still dredge up a little bit of satisfaction from it. They're hard-wired for singing, something Crake couldn't neatly snip out of the genetic code, an obstacle that Crake couldn't get around.

The satisfaction doesn't last long though. Crake would have just shrugged, gone on to tinker with other things so that in the end singing didn't matter after all. Crake is a genius, Oryx said so. Still says so, but only in the dark, her body a half-glimpsed thing from the corner of his eyes, wrapped up in the shadows. White and tender, like satin ribbons, like flower garlands, like something growing unnaturally in the darkness without any light.

She never stays. Crake never visits. There's probably something significant about this. 

A line of ants creeps over his legs, the black kind, although the yellow ones are never far behind. Some days he dozes off on the platform's floor instead of the relative safety of his cot, dreaming of anonymous female hands tickling his sides, lacquered fingernails that are trying to relearn the changed cartography of his body. Instead, he wakes to find himself covered in ants and what seem to be all the insects in the world, feeding on his dried sweat.

It's not just the ants, although the ants are certainly the worst of it, competing to devour both him and his food. Many-legged things bypass the cans of water that stop the ants and sometimes drop from the leaves above into his hair; they squirm in the folds of his sheet, unwelcome bedfellows, and he shakes them out before he can get bitten too badly. It would be really the fitting end if he dies through blood poisoning from a stray bite or ants eating him down to the bone, rather than through a pigoon, a wolvog, anything, everything. This whole world is a lot of potential deaths, most of them unpleasant and undignified, just waiting to happen; it only goes to show that safety is a load of shit.

_Safety_. The word conjures more words in his mind, but these are not the free-floating flotsam jetsam scraps of before-- he sees them on brightly painted signs, on the simplified and exaggerated pictures that illustrate proper procedures. Faceless men and women, their limbs ending with rounded lumps for hands and feet, their bodies neatly captured in barred circles, caught forever doing something wrong. It makes him want to weep in frustration and yearning.

Snowman brushes the ants off with one hand and despite the care, he gets bitten for his troubles. He crosses his legs again, and concentrates with eyes fiercely shut, forcing the bright neon orange of a biohazard sign to fade into the reddish-black behind his eyes. Think. If he concentrates hard enough, maybe he can bring her to life during the daytime. His cock is slumped against his left thigh; it twitches and he thinks he might have something, but… no.

Sun on his shoulders, now. The rank smell of his own sweat. There is no real darkness behind his eyes, only the dimness of light filtered through the thin layer of cells and membranes to beneath. When he cracks his eyelids just a little and squints, a dazzling crescent of light spears though. If he squints hard enough, he can almost pretend that the blurry shapes that pulse and shift behind his eyelids are taking definition, becoming a body. 

_Fey. Transcendence. Crystallize. Transubstantiation._

_There's a scientific term for the shapes, Jimmy,_ Crake would say, his amused contempt for word-smithery shimmering over his voice like heat. _A_ real _word_.

Fuck off, Crake.

_Don't be such a neurotypical, Jimmy._

Somehow he can conjure Crake up more easily than Oryx today, and he doesn't know why. He's never really tried to before, it's always been Oryx. Crake, a silhouette against blazing light in his dark clothing that would make him just as sweat-soaked as Snowman if he were really here. It's the sunlight, the way it flatly presents everything with no softening shadows-- much like Crake, no movement, no teasing, no apologies. No explanations. Things are not so much hidden as simply held back.

Concentrate. _Concentrate_. He's suffused with heat, dizzy with it, almost nauseous. It pools beneath his skin in the hollows of his temples, the crooks of his knees, his belly, then lower. There's no breeze to dry the sweat on his skin, and the sweat makes any movement of skin against skin sticky instead of slick. His head is swimming and his thoughts are becoming disconnected; maybe this means he's doing something right or maybe it means he's about to fall out of the tree and break his neck, chalk another one up for undignified ways to go...

…and he's getting hard _now_. And it's just the most exquisitely stupid thing, somehow. He is sitting naked, in a tree, in the blazing sun, sporting a hard-on that can't make up its mind who it rises for. Evolution hardly seems to apply. 

Without looking, he lets one hand drop on his cock and reposition it so it lies against his lower belly. The touch of his own hand is almost startling after all the time he's spent resolutely not touching himself, it hardly seems a part of him at all. His cock is hot, heavy, and unfortunately far too much a part of him.

What the hell. He can deal with this. Something can be arousing and inexplicable at the same time. Crake would be the first to point that out. Crake _has_ pointed that out. Forget thousands of years of literature, just flip that switch and walk into the brave new world, holding flowers and singing songs. It's all so fucking blue.

Crake has always been a jumping stone to Oryx, or maybe it's the other way around. If he thinks of Crake, maybe Oryx will follow, leaping lightly to him and so lovely as her body hovers suspended in the air. Snowman looks for her. Where is Oryx? Oryx floating to him like a butterfly, like a flower blossom, and so lovely as her body hovers, as her body falls, as her throat opens in a wet, red smile. And Crake is not grinning; Crake stares at him stone-solemn; Crake's chest is opening in a fucking _bouquet_ of wet, red blossoms...

It's stupid.

It's stupid because he keeps thinking about the wrong things and actively refusing to let himself think about anything else. And Crake is the one thing that he really hasn’t tried and that he knows, somewhere in the dusty corners of where he is still Jimmy, that might lift him up beyond this heat, this stink, this meat-prison, even if just for a few seconds… 

_Moratorium. Thrall. Malinger._

Sometimes he wants to, but he's afraid of what will happen next.

The curled hand on his cock-- not really his hand, certainly doesn't feel like his hand-- rests at the base of his cock, fingers moving sluggishly. When he was fifteen, he used to jerk off repeatedly to the point where his skin desensitized, and the more he touched himself, the less response he got. This is like that now, except he hasn't been touching himself, so what the fuck? His cock throbs sullenly, his balls throb, his whole body feels as though it vibrates to some sub-level hum. His eyes sting when sweat drips into them and his fingers move just a little harder, then softer, trying to coax feeling back into the flesh they hold. If he could just feel again, he'd be okay.

So goddamn _stupid._

_Jimmy, you cork-nut._

No. Oh. No. Oh. Either word is shaped the same in his mouth. He can't. He shouldn't. It'll just make things worse for the next time he screams at the sea, for the next time the Crakers want a story, for the next time he just wants to put his hand on his cock and fuck his hand until he can forget himself in stupid-simple pleasure.

But he's come this far, and he might as well keep going. It's what he does, after all. He is a creature of habit and routine, and he has gotten into the habit of being alive.

So, this is what he has. This is all he has left.

He's seen Crake naked, conversed with him while they were both stripped bare and being worked over in the pleeblands, but he doesn't remember any landmarks on that blurred topography of skin. No moles stick out in his mind, no embarrassing patches of hair, no birthmarks. The whole affair was businesslike; Crake completely naked has no place in these thoughts.

Snowman's eyelids flutter a little bit; the pale shapes that dance across his vision are Crake's hands, Crake's fingers at the keyboard, Crake informing all of Snowman's-- all of _Jimmy's_ lovers personally that Jimmy was no longer going to be around and how the fuck did Crake do that, anyway? But he's not thinking about that, he's just thinking of Crake's hands because he remembers those so well. 

The darkness that comes when he closes his eyes more tightly is Crake's clothing, the way his shirt hung, the odd transition of black cloth to pale skin where his collar opened. They didn't touch each other much. He has the bump of Crake's knuckles as they pass Crake's uncle's stolen marijuana back and forth. He has the pressure of Crake's arm across his shoulders guiding him to bed while alcohol tries to tangle his steps. He has the brief sting of a needle and the pressure of Crake's fingers as Crake shoots him full of mystery vaccine, pretty fucking phallic, that.

Crake's hands, opening his collar. Crake's hands, moving decisively among beakers and glassware. Crake's hands, giving Jimmy a printout, giving him Oryx. Crake's hands, giving Jimmy the finger.

Snowman's hand moves up and down his cock. His sheet is puddled beneath him, and the damp ridges of the rucked-up folds made red, tender impressions on the backs of his thighs and buttocks. His breath makes wheezing noises, to himself he sounds as though he is dying.

The thing was, Crake was his friend, Crake was his _best friend_ , and towards the end, his only friend. And would it all have been different in the end if after all the games of Barbarian Stomp, the Blood and Roses, the Extinctathon, among the computer wires, after some talk of him and Crake… To have bitten off the matter with a grin and just, just, done _something_ besides sit back and watch it all happen the way it did?

_Bogus, Jimmy._

Stupid. Trying to justify things like this, about Crake, _to_ Crake. Like staring at the smoking toaster while the house burns down around you, wondering what's wrong with your goddamned toast.

(Oh, Snowman, tell us please, what is toast?)

The hand that jerks up and down his cock is too rough and the rhythm is off, but the heat keeps building. Crake's hands held up as a rectangle to the two-way mirror, framing unknowing Crakers. Crake's hands holding Oryx's slumped body. Crake's hands cutting Oryx's throat. Jimmy's hands on the spray-gun, pulling the trigger like he pulls the trigger now. No, oh, no, oh…

And maybe it's Oryx's hand, or maybe it's some anonymous pleebland girl's hand, or Jimmy's hand, or Snowman's, or maybe this is Crake after all, maybe this is how it might've been. Nothing moves except his hand. The throb has become a thrum has become a full out tremble. He hangs suspended in time and heat like an insect encased in amber. At some point, his breathing has become short, harsh pants; there is the tickle of sweat all over his body, dripping down his lower back like fingernail tips that he cannot see, oh, he cannot see but he feels, oh--

Oh Oryx. Oh Crake. _Oh Jimmy_ , and he doesn't know or care if it's Crake or Oryx he is hearing and he's not Jimmy anymore, he's Snowman, just a facsimile of a man, blank and ready to melt away in this pitiless sun so there is nothing left, nothing left of him at all, and oh, oh, _oh_ , a drawn out exhalation, _ohhhhh..._

"Oh, Crake, oh, shit," he says in a trembling voice.

And he accepts, loves, and is lost in one instant before he comes in a blaze of heat with three sick-quick-slick convulsions, all over his stomach, reaching for the hand on his cock, for whoever is there... 

Reaching for, and finally touching Crake. 

The muscles of his legs are cramping; for a moment he thinks he'll be locked in this position forever, head tilted back, mouth open in an O, and legs folded. The insects will cover him over, the leaves will fall, and he will never emerge. The Crakers will say he has gone to visit Crake in the sky; Snowman supposes they won’t be so far from the truth. Real and not real, his own hand on his cock or the memory of one. But this wasn't a memory so it can't be real.

_Oh Jimmy, why do you worry so much over what you think is real?_

(Snowman, oh Snowman. Please, Snowman, what is _real_? Tell us, please tell us!)

Real is. Real. Is. Real just is.

But then his muscles unlock and go limp, and he is released. Crake, or whatever fucked-up, dredged-up ghost that passed for him, is gone. Snowman concentrates on breathing, shutting his mouth firmly against any sound that could be a name. From a distance there is still song, pure and untouched, peaceful and untroubled.

"Oh, Crake, you bastard," he says weakly again, just in case he hasn't quite made his point yet. 

He can hardly be bothered to wipe away the quickly drying splatters of his own semen; the sun beats down, it'll all just be a bitter rime of salt soon enough. And he closes his eyes, and waits for the ants to begin creeping up his thighs again.

One of these days, he'll figure things out.

**Author's Note:**

> For Twig, whose quality pimpage brought me to this book in the first place.


End file.
